Stop-motion animation has been around nearly as long as the art of filmmaking itself, and its techniques have continued to evolve from its humble beginnings up to the present day.
What follows is not a comprehensive history of the art form, but rather a broad overview of the medium’s major touchtones—a primer to stop-motion animation, if you will. Anyone interested in a deeper exploration of the subject should seek out The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation by Ken A. Priebe (of which you can read an excerpt here) or any of the other texts listed here.
The first film to utilize stop-motion effects was The Humpty Dumpty Circus (circa 1897-1898). The film featured a popular child’s toy at the time, borrowed from co-director Albert E. Smith’s daughter. It was conceived by J. Stuart Blackton and the aforementioned Smith, founders of Vitagraph, a studio famous for faking footage during the Spanish-American War. Sadly, the film is now lost. Blackton went on to make The Haunted Hotel (1907) for Vitagraph. Among other tricks, the film shows an invisible entity slicing bread and pouring coffee.
Contemporaneously to Smith and Blackton, English photographer and cameraman Arthur Melbourne-Cooper developed what is now the oldest surviving stop motion animated film in existence. During the Boer War, British troops were short on matches, prompting a women’s welfare committee to commission Melbourne-Cooper to produce a short film advertising their charity outreach project, whereby civilians could send money to a match-producing company, which would in turn donate matchbooks to the soldiers. The resultant film was Matches’ Appeal (1899), which shows figures constructed of matchsticks writing out sentences on a chalkboard.
Władysław Starewicz became famous for his outstanding stop-motion short films. Also an entomologist, he used real dead insect equipped with wires and wax as puppets in his work, seen most famously in The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), a satire about infidelity utilizing beetles, grasshoppers, and dragonflies. Starewicz continued working until his death in 1965; his highly influential 1933 film The Mascot inspired filmmakers like Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, and the Quay Brothers. Additionally, The Tale of the Fox (1937) also inspired Wes Anderson’s 2009 stop-motion film The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)
Helena Smith Dayton was another early pioneer in clay animation, and an unsung figure among women filmmakers of the silent era. Her most famous work is a Shakespeare adaptation, Romeo and Juliet (1917) using clay dolls. In Margaret I. MacDonald’s contemporary review, partially reprinted in The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors by Anthony Slide, makes special note of the ability of Dayton’s puppets to elicit pathos from the viewer:
This mere lump of clay under [Dayton’s] magic touch takes on the responsibilities of life, and love, and sorrow which the play requires, and finally grasps in desperation the dagger with which it ends its sorry life, falling in tragic fashion over the already lifeless body of its Romeo.
Willis O’Brien pushed the art form to new levels. He worked as a guide for paleontologists, which gave him an early interest in dinosaurs. O’Brien was later commissioned to make a short film for the 1915 World Fair. The resultant short was titled The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Tragedy. This lead to several other filmmaking opportunities, culminating in O’Brien handling the dinosaur special effects for The Lost World (1925), which in turn lead to executives selecting O’Brien to create all the monster effects for King Kong (1933). While his effects for this film were revolutionary, O’Brien did not receive an academy award until 1950 for his work on Mighty Joe Young (1949).
Mighty Joe Young was also a landmark film for one of the biggest names in stop-motion history: Ray Harryhausen. Having a fascination with dinosaurs and other fantasy creatures at a young age, he was especially inspired by O’Brien’s work on The Lost World and King Kong. He began making his own stop motion short films as teenager, and through this work, became O’Brien’s protege. When it came time to employ an assistant animator for Mighty Joe Young, O’Brien selected Harryhausen.
Following the shared success of this win, Harryhausen set out his own, scoring a big hit with The Beast of 20,000 Fathoms (1952)—said to be one of the primary inspirations for Godzilla (1953), though executed with a man in a suit instead of animation. He continued to perfect his methods in landmark films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and One Million Years B.C. (1966). One of his innovations was Dynavision, a process combining live action and stop-motion animation via rear projection techniques previously unheard of. His final film would be Clash of the Titans (1981), as demand for films with more “advanced” special effects rose. Still, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, and several others cited Harryhausen’s influence on their own visually-groundbreaking blockbuster films.
Medusa from Clash of the Titans (1981)
Over the next several decades (1960s-1980s), numerous stop motion and clay-animated television series and specials appeared. Most notable were the creations of Rankin/Bass Productions, especially their holiday specials Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), and several others, as well as their 1967 feature film Mad Monster Party? David W. Allen also created a Volkswagen ad, in which a stop-motion animated King Kong—bearing a striking resemblance to Willis O’Brien’s original creation—ceases his Manhattan marauding and drives a VW 411 off into the sunset. The car company initially hated the commercial, but it has since become an iconic ad from the 1970s. Allen would also go on to meticulously recreate Kong’s Empire State Building climb in the documentary Special Effects: Anything Can Happen (1996).
While effects teams continued to combine realistic stop-motion models with other techniques throughout the 1980s (with notable stop-motion sequences appearing in The Terminator, RoboCop, The Gate, Evil Dead II, *batteries not included, and others), other artists began using the medium in more stylized, expressive, and even surreal ways. This included more kid-friendly fare in the vein of the Rankin/Bass clay-animation specials, like the California Raisins series of commercials and TV specials produced by Will Vinton Studios, as well as Vinton’s 1985 film The Adventures of Mark Twain (featuring a memorable scene involving Satan) and the early shorts of Nick Park, who would go on to create Wallace & Gromit. On the other end of the spectrum, Czech filmmaker and animator Jan Švankmajer continued to perfect his strange blend of stop motion animation and live action with shorts like The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983), based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and Meat Love (1988), as well as his feature-length film Alice (1988), a horror-tinged adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass. Meanwhile, the American-born, England-residing Quay Brothers produced a wealth of nightmarish short films throughout the decade, with perhaps their most famous production being Street of Crocodiles (1986), which features rough-hewn figures with baby doll heads.
Alice (1988)
Early computer graphics techniques, including CGI, quickly replaced most other practical effects, including stop-motion, throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and on into the 2010s. Despite this, several filmmakers embraced stop-motion as an art form and continued to produce films created through the medium. This includes the perennial favorite The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), written and produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick, the latter of whom would go on to direct James and the Giant Peach (1996) and Coraline (2009). Burton also created the stop-motion films Corpse Bride (2005) and Frankenweenie (2012). Tool member and effects creator Adam Jones produced, alongside Fred Stuhr, a stop-motion animated clip for the band’s single “Sober,” a video that was deeply indebted to the works of the Quay Brothers. Nick Park won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature for his 2005 film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit. Wes Anderson wrote and directed the aforementioned Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, and, nine years later, released Isle of Dogs in 2018, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature in 2019. Artist and filmmaker Stefano Bessoni produced the 2013 short Gallows Song, which plays like a hybrid of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Street of Crocodiles. In 2016, Focus Features released the feature film Kubo and the Two Strings. 2019 will also see the release of Missing Link and Farmaggeddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie (a sequel to Shaun the Sheep, which is a spinoff of Wallace & Gromit), while further into the future, audiences will see two new projects from Henry Selick: the film Wendell and Wild and the TV series Little Nightmares.
Beyond this, it’s hard to imagine what delights and horrors, what fantasies and nightmares may spring up from this time-tested film technique.
